Posts tagged with Innovation

From Facebook's new 360-degree videos, which are now available to select brands as a new ad format, to Snapchat's new Sponsored Lens offering, which allows brands to add custom filters to the Snapchat experience, marketers today face a constant stream of new ad products.

With fears about price personalisation growing in recent times, even Harry Enfield’s creations, Stan and Pam Herbert, may think twice about showing off their wealth!

Personalisation is something that has been heralded by businesses and customers alike.

It has mainly been associated with online activity such as personalised content on a website, cross selling suggestions (think Amazon), bespoke emails such “Here’s what’s new from your favourite brands” (mrporter.com), I can list many more examples.

Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.

But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?

If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks?

This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.

And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.

Last week, as the world’s media dissected the details of the Apple Watch and iPhone 6, I spent an inspiring day mentoring at Seedcamp Week London, where some of Europe’s most promising new startups are immersed into the Seedcamp system of networks, learning, and capital raising.

The 28 startups taking part were getting ready to shake up a variety of sectors, from music, retail and design to healthcare, property and more.

I didn’t get to meet them all but I did spend time with two that are creating new digital marketing tools which piqued my interest.

If your organisation is going to do any sort of substantive innovation, it needs to take on risk. That needs a different style of project management.

Why do you do projects?

For most organisations, the answer is usually something to do with change. “We need to add new features to our product. We need to improve the user experience in our online shop. We need to upgrade the technology running our site”.